Hear me out...Making sense of the USMNT failure

If you haven't heard by now, on Tuesday night the United State Men's National Team lost 2-1 to Trinidad and Tobago, a country with a smaller population than Montana and Wyoming combined. It was an embarrassing loss, but to make matters worse it knocked the U.S. out of the 2018 World Cup. This is the first time the U.S. hasn't qualified for the World Cup since 1986. (Hey that was the year before I was born!)

Everywhere you read or watch, Tuesday was an absolute disaster. FiveThirtyEight is declaring it the worst loss in the history of the program. By ELO rankings, a fancy metric ranking sy...